The Power of Friendship

I’ve written about friendship before on this blog, in terms of what it means to me from a story perspective. I’ve always been drawn to stories about friendships, just as friendships have always played a crucial role in my personal life. My friendships mean the world to me. They’re some of the most important relationships in my life, and they always have been.

But as a society, I feel like we don’t honour friendship enough. Romantic relationships are always upheld as the ultimate in personal interaction. We denigrate friendship even as we distinguish it from romantic partnerships. We use terms like ‘just friends’ or ‘friends with benefits’, as if platonic friendships don’t have masses of benefits above and beyond sex.

Just friends. Think about that for a minute. If we celebrated friendship the way we celebrate sexual relationships, such a description wouldn’t exist. Yet friends are the people we stick with through life. They’re the people we turn to in need. They’re the people we want with us when we’re celebrating. They’re the people who know us best. The people we can be our true selves with. The people who love the things we love and fight for the things we fight for. The people who’ve been with us through thick and thin, who’ve outlasted those lauded romances and hugged us through breakups. They’re the people we bond with on levels that far surpass the biological influences of reproduction.

Yet those influences are the ones we turn to, the ones by which we measure ourselves, the ones we see constantly highlighted through the media and in fiction.

I’m the first to admit I’m a sucker for a good romance. I’ll root for my favourite fictional couple any day of the week. I’m sad when real-life romances don’t work out. But fiction in particular comes with a certain expectation of romance. How often do we wait for the central pair in our favourite TV show to finally get together? How many times do we expect the platonic friendship to finally graduate to a sexual relationship? As if it’s not valid unless it does so? As if the true potential of that relationship hasn’t been fully explored until they’ve admitted their true feelings for one another and got it on?

I call bullshit on that. The true potential of a relationship lies in what those two people can achieve together. On what they share above and beyond what they have with anyone else. On what has bonded them and continues to bond them. On the absolute trust they have in each other. Whether that involves romance or not is irrelevant. When a romantic partnership has all those things, it’s one of those partnerships that’s built to last… a partnership that’s based on friendship. And friendship can, and does, have all of those things without the need for romantic attraction.

Mulder and Scully didn’t need to get together to prove the true worth of their friendship. Ron and Hermione could have stayed friends for life without getting married. Xander and Willow didn’t need to go through that weird phase of sucking each other’s faces off (at least they grew out of that one). Their friendships were amazing as it was. They had nothing else to prove. They didn’t need to ‘graduate to the next level’… they’d already reached the ultimate levels of trust and support two people can reach.

I want to see more friendships in fiction. Celebrated, appreciated, adored friendships without the need for romance. I see the Finn/Poe shipping and there’s a part of me rooting my arse off for it… but a larger part of me looking at the amazing potential to explore a deep friendship between two men. A friendship that doesn’t need to prove itself by morphing into romance. Friendship is worthy in and of itself, and I think it’s time we started celebrating that. Friendship has been an underlying theme in my stories for a long time, but I’m making a conscious effort to bring it to the surface. To really focus on it and allow it to be exactly what it is.

Not second best. Not ‘just’ anything. But among the most meaningful and worthwhile relationships it’s possible to have with another person.